BERLIN — The
outcome of state elections in Berlin on Sunday — in which both the
Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, the German capital’s
traditional ruling parties, suffered heavy losses and the
anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) was propelled into the
state assembly — has triggered yet another round of debate over
Angela Merkel’s political future.

Yes, Berlin’s
voters have dealt the embattled chancellor another heavy blow. But
what is most remarkable is the fundamental shift in the country’s
party landscape and political process that this election heralds.
Berlin is Germany’s political and social laboratory par excellence.
It is a microcosm where the country’s major challenges play out as
if under a microscope. So the stability and consensus that have long
been Germany’s political trademark may soon be a thing of the past.

The western and
eastern halves of the city have yet to fully grow back together. The
German economy’s remodeling away from traditional industries toward
services and new technologies has yet to take hold, despite Berlin’s
status as a start-up haven. The city, once labeled “poor but sexy”
by its own mayor, still suffers from social injustice and poverty.
And while Berlin is culturally rich — nearly a third of Berliners
come from non-German backgrounds — full integration continues to be
an uphill struggle. Public administration is notoriously inefficient,
as the city’s failure to build a new airport and chaotic scenes at
refugee centers show.

Similarly, the
politics of the German capital mirror the dynamics of the country at
large, and its most recent elections illustrate a dramatic overhaul
of the German party system.

Sunday’s poll
saw five parties land between 21 and 14 percent, effectively leveling
the playing field.

The political scene
has traditionally been dominated by two Volksparteien, the Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Each
typically garnered around 40 percent of the vote and alternated in
leading governments. Sunday’s poll, however, saw five parties land
between 21 and 14 percent, effectively leveling the playing field
between the erstwhile dominant CDU and SPD on the one hand, and the
Greens, the Left, and the far-right on the other.

* * *

The underlying trend
— more advanced in Berlin, delayed elsewhere in Germany — is
clear. The era of large catch-all parties based on traditional
notions of working class or conservative values and able to
accommodate a vast majority of German citizens is coming to an end.

In its place, a much
more variable geometry of political parties is emerging. The far-left
and the far-right, as well the socially liberal Greens and, to a
lesser extent, the market-liberal Free Democrats, are all sizable
political forces now.

While this
development reflects shifting political sentiments in German society,
it also complicates coalition building. Two-party alliances, long
sufficient to secure necessary majorities to govern, will have to
make way for three-party coalitions. Committing to governing
alliances, negotiating their political program, and maintaining these
for the full term will be more difficult than ever before. Political
processes will be lengthier, coalition programs will be watered down,
and snap elections more frequent. German politics will be far less
stable as a result.

The Berlin elections
also demonstrated that the country’s political fringes have matured
into full political forces. In the old Bonn republic, the far-left
was effectively outlawed and the far-right only made an occasional
appearance. After reunification, Eastern post-communists merged with
the Western far-left. On the Right, it was not until the emergence in
2013 of the AfD, triggered by the eurozone crisis and radicalized by
the refugee crisis, that a political force gathered country-wide
traction.

Now, with
representation in 10 of 16 states, the AfD is here to stay. The
combined constituency of these political fringes is mirrored by the
results of the Berlin ballot: around 20 percent in the west and 40
percent in the east of Germany.

A sizable portion of
Germans from both the Right and the Left now doubt, or flat out
reject, the country’s political legacies — be it the
socially-oriented market economy, cultural and social diversity, or
Euro-Atlantic relationship. What’s worse, this radicalism is not
confined to rhetoric: during this year’s Berlin election campaign,
over 200 politically-motivated offenses were recorded by city police.
Society has become aggressively polarized, hemming in centrist and
moderate positions and threatening Germany’s dialogue and
consensus-oriented political culture.

Ethnic
mobilization opens up Germany’s political process to manipulation
and disruption by foreign governments.

In this climate, the
far-right especially has drawn on ethnicity to attract voters. The
AfD’s campaign among the large and conservative Russian-speaking
community earned it its biggest wins in eastern districts with large
numbers of migrants from the former Soviet Union.

Ethnic mobilization
is not confined to Berlin, however. Germany has recently seen
large-scale demonstrations of Russian-speakers and Turks staged by
governments in Moscow and Ankara, in no small part thanks to their
considerable media reach into those communities.

This trend is new to
German politics, and highly detrimental to the integration of these
minority groups. Worryingly, it also opens up Germany’s political
process to manipulation and disruption by foreign governments. This
could be especially dangerous during times of international tension —
from the refugee crisis to Russian aggression against its neighbors —
in which the government in Berlin plays a key role.

The recent vote in
the German capital was more than a state election. It was a wake-up
call to the fact that German politics is undergoing a sea change that
will leave its imprint on the country’s federal elections in 2017
and beyond. Welcome to the Berlin Republic.

Joerg Forbrig is
senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United
States in Berlin.

Even
as she defended the "political and ethical" decision to let
in one million asylum seekers in 2015 in the face of a potential
humanitarian catastrophe, Merkel admitted mistakes that she would
avoid in future.

"If
I could, I would turn back time many, many years to better prepare
myself, the federal government and all those in positions of
responsibility for the situation we were rather unprepared for in the
late summer of 2015," Merkel said.

Merkel,
who has been in office since 2005, was speaking to reporters after a
dismal showing for her conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in
Berlin state elections Sunday, two weeks after a drubbing for the
party in another regional poll.

In
an unusually frank opening statement, Merkel said the errors included
a long-standing refusal to accept Germany's transformation in the
postwar decades into a multicultural society.

"We
weren't exactly the world champions in integration before the refugee
influx," she wryly admitted, noting that the infrastructure for
getting newcomers into language and job training had had to be ramped
up overnight.

In
the Berlin election, the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany
(AfD) harnessed a wave of anger over the refugee influx to claim
around 14 percent of the vote.

Merkel's
CDU slumped to just 18 percent - its worst post-war result in the
city - likely spelling the end of its term as junior coalition
partner to the Social Democrats (SPD), who won just under 22 percent.

She
acknowledged that her "We can do this" rallying cry during
the refugee crisis had become a provocation to many who felt it
expressed a glibness about the challenges ahead and said she would
now refrain from using it.

But
she continued to resist calls from within her conservative bloc to
set a formal upper limit for the number of asylum seekers admitted to
Germany.

And
she struck an optimistic note about the ability of Europe's top
economic power to eventually integrate tens of thousands of refugees
who stay in Germany, including many from war-ravaged Syria.

"I
am absolutely certain that we will emerge from this admittedly
complicated phase better than we went into it," she said.